Transparensee offers real estate, events listing technology

Generally speaking, sites that use Transparensee's search technology deliver something on the order of 40 percent more leads.”

Connie Chen, Transparensee

By Jane Nicholes

Real estate is all about location, location, location. Real estate online searches are all about speed, range and similarity.

Associate member Transparensee Systems Inc. is a technology company based in Manhattan. "The thing that we're actually really well-known for is what we call the search-and-discovery space," according to Connie Chen, senior vice president/sales.

For some 75 newspaper clients, Transparensee markets what it believes to be faster, more efficient solutions for real estate and calendar listings, both online and print.

Enclosure, a real estate search platform, is intended to ease the process of finding a new residence. In addition to traditional platforms in which a potential buyer or renter enters basic desires such as number of bedrooms and price range, Enclosure allows the user to narrow the search parameters in other ways, to prioritize what he or she thinks is most important and, perhaps most important, to find similar listings.

Chen calls the feature the "fuzzy search." For example, a search for a $400,000 three-bedroom, two-bath home in Neighborhood A may turn up a lower-priced home in Neighborhood B, which someone moving to a new city may not have considered. Users can also draw boundary lines on a map of a city or nearby area to narrow a search to within those boundaries.

Enclosure can turn up both exact matches and close matches. As Chen notes, people who want "more for less" may set parameters that typically have no matches, and without close matches, they usually have to start the search all over. If each search takes so much as three to five seconds, they may get frustrated and leave a newspaper's real estate platform for someone else's.

"Generally speaking, sites that use Transparensee's search technology deliver something on the order of 40 percent more leads," she said. "The reason is probably partly because of the speed, [but] also definitely because of the fuzziness of the close matching and searching that we actually put in place."

How fast is fast? Chen said Enclosure search results come up in 40 to 70 milliseconds, or "near real-time speed."

Enclosure is compatible with multiple mobile applications and front-end systems. The technology also allows newspaper websites to boost advertiser placement. And the company offers plenty of advice for newspaper sales staff on how to attract real estate clients and on how to package online and print services together.

Publishers can purchase the platform through PAGE Cooperative and via a standard licensing model consisting of a one-time set-up fee and a monthly licensing fee.

As for those labor-intensive but all-important calendar and sports listings, Transparensee recently purchased Tampa-based Pointslocal. "We have digital solutions for doing calendars of events. We have solutions around sports," Chen said.

The Pointslocal technology aims to efficiently collect the minutiae of events listings, sports statistics and the like and "reverse publish" the material from the website to print rather than making duplicate entries.

"We can pre-define templates for whatever front-end system you have," Chen said. The technology is also capable of "web scraping" to obtain initial event information and of setting up individual pages with photos and video. The newspaper's own web and page design drives the templates, not the other way around, she said.

Jane Nicholes, a regular contributor to the eBulletin, is a freelance writer and editor based in coastal Alabama. She is an award-winning veteran of more than 30 years in the newspaper business. Reach her at jbnicholes@att.net. Nominate your company for an associate member spotlight article!